You know what grinds my gears? Despite infinite advancements in digital distribution and recording, the making and releasing of music is basically the same now as it was 20 years ago. You make an album, you promote the album, you tour the album, then you do it all again. With a little ingenuity and gumption, though, you can do whatever the fuck you want. You could write a hundred 20-second songs and dump them all on streaming the next day, or record yourself singing absentmindedly as you go for a walk around the park and turn it into one long music video. There are no rules, man—and, yet, there are still rules.
This frustration is why my interest was piqued when I heard that the Los Angeles singer-songwriter Loren Kramar, who released an excellent, deeply strange debut album on Secretly Canadian last year titled Glovemaker, had recorded an EP of Lana Del Rey covers. Titled Living Legend, the Lana homage includes a Murderers’ Row of collaborators, including producer Daniel Aged, avant-garde saxophonist Sam Gendel, and the folk-R&B singer Zsela. The five songs on the EP include well-known classics like “Ride” as well as underappreciated gems in Del Rey’s catalogue like “Heroin,” a barn-burner that appears towards the end of 2017’s Lust For Life. The EP was recorded quickly and instinctively, and supported with an event this past weekend at LA’s Cafe Triste, hosted by Kramar’s friends Eckhaus Latta. It’s a first-thought, best-thought strategy that feels deeply in-tune with Lana’s own fluid relationship with the music industry.
Shaad D’Souza: Why did you decide to do a project like this—covering very contemporary songs all by one artist?
Loren Kramar: I asked myself the same question. It started almost accidentally a year ago—I was asked to do the soundtrack for an Eckhaus Latta show in New York. They wanted these singer-songwriter driven covers, and I suggested Lana. After the fashion show, I said to Daniel [Aged, musician], “We should record a covers EP.” When we started to do that, I just didn’t find it very inspiring. I thought it would be much more interesting if… I started to think [about how] if I found out that one of my friends did a Lana Del Rey covers album—like some motherfucker in New York or something, signed to one of these indie labels—I would die of jealousy. I just felt like there was a kind of cultural race—somebody’s bound to do it, she’s got so much material. I just thought, why not? It seemed like there was so much more at stake, and that excited me, like the nerve to do it. Who the fuck do I think I am to go and do something like this?
You’ve chosen a lot of my favorite deep cuts. What was your methodology for choosing songs, and what’s your relationship with Lana been like over the years?
I’ve loved Lana from the beginning. I remember being in my apartment in New York all those years ago and seeing “Video Games.” I remember watching it and thinking “Who is this?” The project became much more emotional than I anticipated, because it felt like I got to embody the voice of the listener. And that is what’s so exciting—everybody loves her and has this really private and very specific relationship to each of these songs, but I get to be a representative of that, that listening figure. The way that I describe it is like I got to roleplay being this actor going through scripts, looking for the right material. And the scripts were all of the songs in the Lana discography.
Years ago, I was invited to this strip karaoke party in LA where you would strip to a song instead of sing to it. SOPHIE was at that party, and SOPHIE is the big musical hero of mine. I stripped to the song “Heroin,” and I love that song for a million reasons: I’ve got my own relationship to addiction, I’m sober for three years, but the song is incredibly sexy and kind of syrupy, and so I wanted to record it because I wanted to sort of memorialize my own story that involves SOPHIE and strip karaoke and these things that nobody would really know about. But yeah, it’s trying to solidify these specific relationships that I have with these songs. A record of my own relationship to this material.
On Instagram, you wrote this really lovely thing about how not changing any pronouns on “Hope is a dangerous thing for a woman like me to have—but I have it” kind of spoke to you and your queerness. Can you tell me a bit about that idea?
I was made very aware at a very early age not to act too faggy. Like, why is your hand being held that way? And why are you playing with Barbie dolls? And why do you want to be Belle from Beauty and the Beast? I remember being on a t-ball team and a little boy saying, “Loren, what kind of name is Loren? Are you a girl?” [I was] very self conscious as a little kid, singing along to Whitney Houston, who was my favorite singer as a kid—being very aware not to use certain pronouns, and not refer to myself as a girl or a woman, because I was scared of what that might mean.
I see it all the time on YouTube covers, or BBC Live Lounge covers, where the guy will change the pronouns of a song.I always think it’s so corny when they do that. Thinking of the history of gay slang—me and my gay and queer friends, we always refer to each other as girl or whatever. Woman, not so much. That’s so different. I’m constantly referring to myself as girl—and I don’t think anything of it—but to refer to myself as a woman in this song felt so serious. It felt like, in talking to a lot of my queer friends, especially other gay men, that really resonated.
“Heroin,” for me, is a top three Lana song—it really shows off her vocal dexterity. I’m interested in what struck you about that song when you first heard it.
Her vocal dexterity is not talked about so often, especially in Pitchfork reviews or whatever. A singer’s voice is such a complicated and hairy thing to talk about. Elizabeth Grant chose this name, and the voice sounds like what Lana Del Rey conjures. It’s this cooing, controlled, smoky, seductive thing. I love when that breaks and it goes beyond that character. That happens in “Heroin,” it happens in “White Dress.” It happens more and more, and it’s so exciting because she’s created a rhythm and an expectation in the listener, for what the vocal is going to sound like. It seems like a shattering of the character when she breaks that. That’s something in “Heroin” that really draws me to it.
I wanted to ask about how you first connected with Eckhaus Latta, who are doing merch for this EP.
I went to Cooper Union, and it’s such a small circuit, those East Coast art schools. Zoe [Latta] and Mike [Eckhaus] went to RISD. I just remember as soon as that clothing line launched, I became pretty aware of it because they were art school kids that started a fashion brand. So many mutual friends were in their fashion shows. I remember seeing the first Eckhaus Latta item that was resold on eBay, however many years ago.
We ended up meeting through so many mutual friends in New York. [One day], the most beautiful guy I’d ever seen in real life was hanging outside of Cooper Union. It was Cole Mohr, and he went on to become a friend of mine and a muse of Eckhaus Latta. I became an actual friend of Zoe and Mike’s in the past few years, and they’ve been really supportive of the music. They asked if I would do the soundtrack [for the Fall 2024 show], and then they asked if I would sing again at another show last year. It’s all, like, a fucking little family affair, you know? It’s community in the realest sense. They trusted me to do whatever the fuck I wanted, so the artwork for the shirt is a drawing that I made. It’s a real collaboration.
I’m interested in how this project has influenced your next set of originals.
Daniel and I were saying this is how making records should always be: fast, intuitive, unfussy.
photographs TYLER MATTHEW OYER